Same targeting and stat damage rules as for Assassin's and Enforcer's crossbow, but it targets largest DD instead of largest ST/DX.
For all of you crying "unfair", I can only point at the other two crossbows and say the exact same thing.

no, mages have it bad enough. There is no point for this weapon. next thing you would say is a str and dex seeking sling? No the Ax and Ex bow both fill up a niche. There is no need for yet another weapon which niche already had been filled.

Theoretically, taking the drain all in single hit aspect aside, the Reason a DD version of the A/EXbow would be utterly OP is the relationship between stat and weapon.

Drain Dex and you still hit for full damage with PTH. Drain STR and you still have the X portion of the Weapon that you can't reduce.

Drain DD and there's no X/+ immune to draining. Plus it would make it that much more easy to kill the Mage fro thier own ever increasing AMF Backlash (if it changes round to round, which it should), while EC helps you get to a zero stat, it doesn't kill you along the way.

i think the special effects on the two xbows should be transferred to bows first of all. that way a skill slot is required to make them work and without archery trained the special effect will not kick in.

then change the drain amount to a fixed percentage each round, or a fixed amount even but tie that amount to the archery skill level such as 5%. 1.0 does 100 percent of drain, .9 does 90 percent, etc.

so for the example above, if you have 1.0 archery, you get the 5% per round but if your archery is .9 then you would only get 4.5% drain per round.

crosbows would only be a damage-dealing weapon that can use ranged rounds without a skill being used, something to throw on a minion to get a bit extra damage because she already has str and dex trained.

Yeah, we can't have a DD-xbow because then a 2 minion team could stop all other teams in a couple of rounds. At least at this point only tanks can be completely neutralised and the solution is to not be a tank and then the xbow has little effect since damage is so low.

Yukk, your logic is unbeatable :))
So it's ok to have the other xbows because "at least you can be a non-tank", but we can't have this new one because then a two minion team could completely shut down any other team ? What about an opposing team built the same way ? What about people that WANT to be tanks ? What about... well, you get the idea :)

No, seriously, if the MSXBow would be broken, then the rest of the XBows are broken too. If the rest of the XBows are fine, a MSXBow would be fine too.
So either add that or fix the other two :P

sorry, i wasn't real clear on that! when i asked the question, the soc did not exist. in that discussion though i was often told, and rightly so, that making things equal wasn't necessary and that there was other balancing factors.

of course now we do have the soc for what that's worth. the downside is that i really wanted the cost curve adjusted for the mage shield rather than a counterpart...that was done as well actually.

Sickone, sorry you didn't see the actual statement I was trying to make.
I was basically stating exactly what you said, but leaving it up to the reader to come to that conclusion. Anyone who wants to be invulnerable to any tank team needs merely to equip a single x4000 ax/ex bow and the deal is as good as done. Sure, they may have PL to divert the shots but even with 3 PL minions all with stats higher than the tank (as silly as that would be), that leaves 4 ranged rounds to nullify the tank.
Also, there's evasion which has always been the bane of ranged weapons, but a serious tank probably has either archery if it's a ranged tank or bloodlust and that leaves no room for another skill. If the strat chooses to adopt EV and lose the tank skills then there isn't enough EXP after dilution to compete but I guess Dudemus would say this is a valid solution since his poor underpowered mage only have 1/2 Billion exp in DD :) Just joshing you Dude but you have to admit you have no sympathy for a tank that basically HAS to divide its EXP by at least 4 even as a single minion.

Mostly I think we argue just for the sake of it. Jon has his ideas of what he wants here and we're powerless and that's when people "pray to the gods".
I think whoever it was that posted that there is an MgS equivalent has nailed it. The tank folks are grumpy because it's currently mage blender and they want tank blender back :)

Without doing the math, I do not believe that the SoC is a melee version of the MgS. A big Mithril Shield does the exact same thing and is probably better (especially with steel skin) at reducing damage. The SoC's secondary and tertiary abilities are what make it different, not the melee dmg reduction. And the Mithril Shield helps against magic DD's as well...

Well, one decent start would be to heavily reduce the base chance to hit of "speciality" crossbows, so that you actually could evade the effects altogether if the enemy has no serious DX investment by simply using Displacement boots and having a noticeably higher DX.

The second decent thing to do (as an alternative to the first option, not as a complement) would be to ALSO scale the stat reduction with target HP and actual damage dealt (i.e. percentage of enemy health damaged should be proportional to stat damage inflicted, at a certain attacker ST and weapon x - exactly how high of a percentage, that's another story).

SoC is not another MgS. It would be bad to compare them, sooner or later if the community every accepts that people will say, "why isn't the MgS like the SoC?" or "Since one is weaker there is a problem!"

I can almost see the MgS threads asking for a capacity attribute, or a SoC thread asking for more reduction.

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